Antarctica (31 page)

We all approached the bottom part of the drill, the business end where the cutters were and where the ice core was supposed to be. It was dripping clear fluid from its jaws, but as everyone already suspected there was no core. Above the core barrel, though, was another chamber where ice chippings were guided by spiral channels, and this one was almost full. That was the problem right there.

Laurent decided to do a cleaning run, not to cut any core but to remove the interfering chippings. He saw me looking wistfully at the machines: ‘Do you want to do this run?' I slid quickly into the driver's seat before he could change his mind.

He showed me the controls. There was a huge red emergency stop button (‘feel free to press this at any time'); a knob to control the cable winch speed; a switch to trigger the cutters and turn them back off. I practised twiddling the knobs and watching the computer screen. Then through the windows I saw a nod from Sergio outside and started the winch slowly, watching the numbers and coloured lines rolling past on the screen. Outside, the drill swayed a little from side to side before Sergio grabbed it and steered it safely into the hole. Technically, since I was driving it was my job to make sure he closed a small trapdoor afterwards so nothing could fall in and wreck the drill. But he had done this many times before and I kept my attention on the cable speed, which I was now allowed to ratchet up.

Over the next hour, the drill continued its progress downwards, though at one point Laurent chided me gently for letting it go too fast. The whole system was much more skittish than I expected, like a nervous horse. Small tweaks had big effects, and that was before you started factoring in the places the team had already encountered where the ice was brittle, or soft, or just plain ornery. As instructed, I carefully stopped the cable when we were sixty-five feet above the ice, then restarted, inching slowly down to nine feet. Now I could start the cutters, dislodging the chips so they could be safely steered up to the chip barrel.

I flicked the switch, and then asked Laurent the question that had been bothering me. This whole thing was becoming difficult and potentially dangerous. So why didn't he just stop, with more than 10,000 feet of ice safely recovered? He didn't want to, he said, nobody wanted to. There was still more ice to be drilled. The deeper they went the older it was, and the more likely it could tell us an important new part of the Earth's climate story.

And so they kept on trying whatever they could think of. One cognac bomb. Two cognac bombs. Alcohol that was more diluted. Alcohol that was more concentrated. Pure alcohol. (‘Perhaps we should try real cognac,' Saverio said, as Laurent recounted this litany.) They had even tried grease, though Laurent was a bit reluctant—and he drew the line at any other lubricants. It was important, he said, not to mess up the hole by throwing in any old junk. And it was also important to keep cleaning it of the ice chippings and alcohol that had started to clog up the bottom. (Though it might seem shocking to be pouring all these chemicals into the pristine ice, everything up here on the plateau would eventually slide down to the sea and break off as icebergs. Antarctica had its own internal cleaning mechanism. It was only a matter of time.)

The drill continued, chewing the chips and spitting them out and up. I had to watch the current. If it rose, I'd have started cutting ice instead of chippings and must immediately stop. And there it went. I flicked the switches to stop both cable and motor. ‘Sorry,' Laurent said, ‘you're not cutting any core on this run.'

I know, I know. And yet, for some reason, I was reluctant to stop. Perhaps I was also beginning to understand a little of why these guys were prepared to come to this place to spend days and nights in this freezing tent, fiddling with tiny screws in ungloved hands, heaving this massive steel barrel (with a core inside, the lower, detachable part of the drill weighed as much as a hefty human), enduring frozen fingers and aching backs and legs, and then staring hopelessly into yet another empty barrel, before re-prepping the drill and starting all over again. Just like the meteorites, it was a kind of treasure hunt. There was ice down there and I wanted to get it.

I said nothing, but Laurent had clearly noticed. ‘Be careful,' he said, ‘it's a drug.'

It also took an inordinate amount of patience. We had to wait another hour for ‘my' run to re-emerge. (And I was proud to note that the barrel was suitably crammed with chippings.) Then the drillers prepared a couple of cognac bombs and set the drill up for a real run.

As it descended I wandered off in search of food. When I returned, everyone was crowded round the computer in the small hut. It seemed they had been cutting, or at least they thought they had. Now was the moment to stop the blades from spinning, and heave on the cable. This should activate the ‘core dogs', teeth that shot out and helped snap the ice cleanly across so that the core segment could be brought back up to the surface. I watched the figures with a newly knowledgeable eye, as the tension on the cable mounted then abruptly fell and the drill started rising. Looking good. And then, nearly an hour later, the head of the drill appeared in the hole, and the team moved into action, lifting up the trapdoors in the floor of the tent, lying the drill on its side and levering it up and out of the trough. This time, too, it was dripping with clear fluid, but as the end swung up into view it gleamed with a cargo that was rather more precious than diamonds.

There was an ice core.

We couldn't remove it yet, though. First the core barrel had to be detached from the rest, have cords tied around it at either end and then be heaved up and over to a temperature-controlled oil bath where it would sit until its own temperature had steadied. Laurent told me that the ice was near freezing point at the bed but had travelled up through ice, and drilling fluid, that grew colder and colder until it reached -60°F. For the ice, that would have been a tremendous shock. It needed to be gently warmed to a temperature closer to the one it was used to before it could be removed and studied.

And, then, the team opened the lid of the bath, heaved up the barrel and used a wooden pole to push the core out on to a waiting holder on the bench. It was gorgeous: a perfect transparent cylinder, about a metre long, cut through with large crystal boundaries that were clearly visible as if through a window. It had never before been seen by human eyes. It was the oldest part of the oldest continuous ice core on Earth. I put my face close to it, careful not to touch, holding my breath.

Laurent, standing behind me, contemplated it with satisfaction. ‘Don't ask me why this one worked while the others didn't,' he said. And then he turned to prepare for another run.

Now the ice was playing ball. Over the next day the team brought up another core and then another. They were getting perilously close to the bedrock. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, was the current chief scientist for the drilling and she was starting to worry. At some point above bedrock the ice tipped over the edge from solid to liquid. There was at least a pool of water, which might be part of a whole system of under-ice rivers and lakes. They couldn't afford to contaminate it with drill fluid, just in case. Perhaps it represented a whole new ecosystem. Perhaps there was something that they shouldn't contaminate.

Laurent wanted to keep going; Dorthe wanted to stop. And then the decision was taken out of both of their hands. There had been no warning. But on 21 December news spread through the camp faster than fire. The drill was stuck!

It was the same old story, a horrible echo of that day back in 1998. A perfectly normal run ended with a lurch in the motor current and however hard it pulled the cable couldn't help. Maximum tension. No effect. At least this time there was glycol ready to hand. Laurent sent solid chips of it rattling down the hole, clanging against the cable and then sinking slowly down in the fluid. All there was to do was wait.

The hours passed, slowly, with the cable still pulling at maximum strength. One, two, three . . . after four hours, the tension on the cable spontaneously dropped. Gingerly, Laurent took the controls and raised the tension again. And, miraculously, the drill rose.

That was it, the end of the drilling season and the end of an extraordinary project. Nobody was going to risk another run. Emails went out and congratulations started flooding in from around the world.

‘We have finished with the drilling after having trapped and freed the drill at a depth of 3270.2m,' Laurent wrote in his diary. ‘There is still 6m of ice left, which we will not touch for political and ecological reasons. We prefer to leave the impression that we have not polluted the base below the ice where water is present. Even if that could seem a very minimal impact, the image is too strong for us not to pay attention. The ego of the driller has taken a blow, but intellectually it's very satisfying.'

That evening there was a party, European-style, in the EPICA workshop. Using the biggest knife from the kitchen, one that looked more like a machete, Laurent briskly lopped the top off a magnum of champagne. The cork, wire retainer, bottle top and all flew into the air, leaving a surprisingly neat diagonal slice in the green glass neck. There was a general roar of approval from the assembled crowd of Concordians who then started passing round plastic cups that were frothing over with bubbles. When I received mine, I understood why they were still frothing. As well as champagne, each cup also contained chippings of 8oo,ooo-year-old ice. I detected a definite whiff of drilling fluid in the mix, but said nothing. Instead I wandered over to where Laurent was standing.

‘How do you feel?'

‘Like someone has cut the strings to my shoulders.'

Now the drilling was done, everyone was more relaxed, and this first celebration heralded the beginning of party season at Dome C. Christmas was upon us. Here, as in most parts of the continent, intensely hard work was the norm. Scientists, who were often here for only part of the season, could end up working round the clock to get everything done; the people who were here on contract for the entire season to maintain or build the station still worked ten-hour days six days a week, and on Sundays they were often out in snow dozers, levelling ground or preparing for new projects. But now there would be dancing and feasts and the entire crew would get a day and a half off.

The food would be spectacular. Frenchman Jean-Louis Duraffourg was the head chef, sharing his duties with a Swiss-Italian, who was responsible for the pasta. All the French called Jean-Louis the
Reine-Mere
(the Queen Mother), for his fussy, slightly camp persona. He was round of figure, with white hair and moustache and a bustling manner. Appreciate his food and he was your friend for life. He would beckon you into the kitchen to give you privileged access to first tastings of the delicacies that he was considering serving for the next feast. He was an Antarctic artiste. He had even devised a special recipe for making baguettes rise properly in the thin, high-altitude air. He wouldn't, however, divulge this no matter how much you begged. Jean-Louis had been coming here a long time, and his Christmas and New Year feasts were legendary.

Before the seven-course spectacular, there was to be a reception across the way in the free-time tent. I was wearing what passed for party chic in Antarctica: jeans, hiking boots, a black thermal top, but I also had an ice-blue furry gilet that my friends had bought me before I left, and I had dared to apply a little lipstick.

Now, though, I was feeling unexpectedly shy. This was my first taste on the ice of the wide gender imbalance that has been true of Antarctica for most of its human history. Though the American bases that I'd already visited were more or less 60:40 men to women, here we were six women and forty-four men.

Rita had already chatted to me cheerfully about this. When she first came here four seasons ago there were only two women, and the following year she was here on her own. ‘You become everybody's sister,' she says. ‘Or like a doll. People are very careful with you. And they're also proprietorial. You're not allowed to have one or two friends. If you speak with just one person, it only takes a few minutes before other men start to surround you. Some women deal with it by becoming surrogate men. Others make themselves invisible.' That year, she didn't touch her makeup. ‘If you're alone, you don't want to be noticed so much—you don't want to draw attention.'

I write about science; it wasn't as if I was unused to being in groups of men with very few women. But there were still aspects of the environment that I found intimidating. I think I was supposed to. In the wooden room—the designated hangout of the Italian contract workers, which was also the first sight of the station for most visitors—there hung a girly calendar. And not a misty ‘tasteful' one either. In this calendar the girls weren't just naked, they were tied up. There was a daily ceremony in which the boys chose which image to turn to, with general roars of appreciation. Apparently there used to be three calendars, but one year a (male) American scientist cleverly brought some maps of Italy and suggested they could talk about home instead. That was enough to displace two of the calendars, but about the last they were adamant.

Thanks to the concerted efforts of Patrice Godon, the head of logistics at the French polar institute, IPEV
²
, whom I met in DDU, the French side was more enlightened. At his command the traditional ‘wall of knickers' had just been removed from the macho outpost, Cap Prud'homme, which was on the mainland just across from DDU. (Before Patrice's intervention, every woman passing through Cap Prud'homme was supposed to leave a pair of knickers to be displayed, with their name, on the wall. Men working there brought in knickers from their wives. To put on the wall. I wasn't offended by this, so much as baffled.)

There were also a few more women in the French programme. Patrice had made it his business to hire women engineers and technicians. Two were here at the station—Marianne Dufour, a contractor who was spending the summer working on the construction, and diminutive Claire le Calvez, who was a fulltime employee at IPEV. Claire would not just be the only woman in the first wintering crew here, but would also be head technician. She was candid about her relative lack of experience, which was perhaps one reason that she was universally respected. She was also the first woman to drive the gruelling two-week tractor train that brings heavy goods up here from the coast, more than 600 miles away. I couldn't imagine her ever complaining about anything. She was good-humoured, tolerant and self-possessed and I sensed that she would have a good winter.